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| Bob Carr, the Australian senator and foreign minister |
Australia’s foreign
minister has said that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is safer in the Swedish
capital than London, despite his efforts to avoid extradition.
The 41-year-old Australian
has been granted refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in the UK capital since June
while fighting extradition to Sweden amid sexual assault accusations. Assange
and his supporters claim he has done nothing wrong and that the charges are
part of a plot to send him to Washington to face charges for the release of
classified cables via his whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.
Now, Bob Carr, the
Australian senator and foreign minister, has said that the belief that
Washington is looking to extradite the controversial figure is “ludicrous” and
that Assange is actually safer in Stockholm than in Britain.
The comments came during
an interview with Australia’s ABC news agency, in which he said, “There is the
sense that the United States are pursuing Julian Assange. Julian Assange was in
London living freely for two years. If the United States had wanted to
extradite him they could have done so.”
“The Swedes have won in
the UK courts. It’s nothing to do with WikiLeaks. It’s about a criminal
allegation made in Sweden and that’s why he’s in the Ecuadorian Embassy,” he
said.
Carr went on to add, “If
the Swedes had him in Stockholm he’d been even more…harder for the US to
extradite, if that’s what they wanted to do then he’s been for the last two
years in the United Kingdom.”
Mr Carr’s comments come
despite Ecuadorian foreign minister Ricardo Patiño saying last year that
Assange was given asylum because there was “strong evidence” that he is likely
to face retaliation from the US and other countries that had produced the
classified information released on WikiLeaks.
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